Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social
Movement Under Siege

BY WILL POTTER City Lights, 2011 256 Pages

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

On May 26, 2004, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI
Director Robert Mueller held a press conference to announce that A1
Qaeda was planning a major attack on the United States. Two months
earlier, 191 people were killed and another 1,800 injured when several
bombs were set off in Madrid. Terrorism warnings of the sort Ashcroft
and Mueller offered had become commonplace in the post9/11 landscape and
there were fears that an attack like the one in Spain might be
replicated in the United States. Out of public view, however, the
federal government was waging a war against what it considers an equally
serious threat: animal rights extremists and eco-terrorism.

On that same morning in May 2004, FBI agents stormed the homes of
seven animal rights activists in California. The group of young men and
women had been working on a campaign to shut down Huntingdon Life
Sciences, a research lab that kills tens of thousands of animals
annually to test household products, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and
food ingredients. Drawing on the success of efforts in the UK (Stop
Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, or SHAC, was launched there in the late
1990s) the group engaged in fairly traditional tactics--organizing
protests, distributing leaflets, publishing newsletters, and maintaining
a website. The group also publicized the underground efforts, including
arson and ecosabotage, of other loosely affiliated groups including the
Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front (ELF). (The group
posted a disclaimer on its website saying it they did not engage in
illegal activity but supported those who did.)

The story of how the SHAC 7 came to be branded as domestic
terrorists is the subject of Will Potter's important new book,
Green Is the New Red, a deeply troubling account of the federal
government's crackdown on the radical environmental movement. Since
9/11, a great deal has written about the expansion of the national
security state and the threat to civil liberties. The details of the
Patriot Act and the Bush administration's use of illegal
wiretapping have been thoroughly scrutinized. But far less attention has
been paid to how the government has placed the surveillance and
prosecution of environmental dissidents on par with pursuing A1 Qaeda.

During a 2004 Senate hearing called 'Animal Rights: Activism
vs. Criminality," John E. Lewis, then the deputy assistant director
of counterterrorism for the FBI, laid out the agency's focus:
"The FBI's investigation of animal rights extremists and
eco-terrorism matters is our highest domestic terrorism investigation
priority." This, despite the fact that not a single person had been
killed or injured by environmental or animal rights activists. One can
debate the merits of arson as a form of protest, but to label it
terrorism of the kind practiced by groups like A1 Qaeda is a stretch.

Meanwhile, as Potter points out, the killing of physicians who
perform abortions (eight were murdered between 1977 and 2009) and even
Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma were
treated as isolated crimes and not acts of terrorism. Why the
difference? In Potter's view, the animal rights and radical
environmental movements were beginning to achieve a measure of public
appeal that posed a real threat to powerful corporate interests, which
lobbied to silence them.

"The government treats attacks on corporate property more
seriously than violence against doctors and minorities not because of
the nature of the crime but because of the politics of the crime,"
Potter writes.

Two years after they were arrested, the SHAC 7 were found guilty on
all counts, including conspiracy to violate the Animal Enterprise
Protection Act. A number of those arrested agreed to name names, one
committed suicide, and others were sentenced to years in prison. Another
person convicted of eco-terrorism, Daniel McGowan of the ELF, was
eventually transferred to a special prison known as "Little
Guantanamo" where he is allowed one 15-minute telephone call per
week and four visitation hours a month--conditions far more restrictive
than the Supermax prison that holds Zacarias Moussaoui and Olympic Park
bomber Eric Rudolph.

Potter writes: "If there is one thing that should be learned
from history from governments that have gone down this path, it is this:
secretive prisons for 'second-tier' terrorists are often
followed by secretive prisons for 'third-tier terrorists' and
'fourth-tier terrorists,' until one by one, brick by brick,
the legal wall separating 'terrorist' from
'dissident' or 'undesirable' has crumbled."

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